A Brief Life of Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896,
the namesake and second cousin three times removed of the author of the National Anthem.
Fitzgerald’s given names indicate his parents’pride in his father’s ancestry. His
father, Edward, was from Maryland, with an allegiance to the Old South and its values.
Fitzgerald’s mother, Mary (Mollie) McQuillan, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant
who became wealthy as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul. Both were Catholics.

Edward Fitzgerald failed as a manufacturer of wicker furniture in St. Paul, and he
became a salesman for Procter & Gamble in upstate New York. After he was dismissed
in 1908, when his son was twelve, the family returned to St. Paul and lived comfortably
on Mollie Fitzgerald’s inheritance. Fitzgerald attended the St. Paul Academy; his
first writing to appear in print was a detective story in the school newspaper when
he was thirteen.

During 1911-1913 he attended the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in New Jersey,
where he met Father Sigourney Fay, who encouraged his ambitions for personal distinction
and achievement. As a member of the Princeton Class of 1917, Fitzgerald neglected
his studies for his literary apprenticeship. He wrote the scripts and lyrics for the
Princeton Triangle Club musicals and was a contributor to the Princeton Tiger humor
magazine and the Nassau Literary Magazine. His college friends included Edmund Wilson
and John Peale Bishop. On academic probation and unlikely to graduate, Fitzgerald
joined the army in 1917 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry.
Convinced that he would die in the war, he rapidly wrote a novel, “The Romantic Egotist”;
the letter of rejection from Charles Scribner’s Sons praised the novel’s originality
and asked that it be resubmitted when revised.

In June 1918 Fitzgerald was assigned to Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, Alabama. There
he fell in love with a celebrated belle, eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre, the youngest
daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. The romance intensified Fitzgerald’s hopes
for the success of his novel, but after revision it was rejected by Scribners for
a second time. The war ended just before he was to be sent overseas; after his discharge
in 1919 he went to New York City to seek his fortune in order to marry. Unwilling
to wait while Fitzgerald succeeded in the advertisement business and unwilling to
live on his small salary, Zelda Sayre broke their engagement.

Fitzgerald quit his job in July 1919 and returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel
as This Side of Paradise. It was accepted by editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribners in
September. Set mainly at Princeton and described by its author as “a quest novel,” This
Side of Paradise traces the career aspirations and love disappointments of Amory Blaine.

In the fall-winter of 1919 Fitzgerald commenced his career as a writer of stories
for the mass-circulation magazines. Working through agent Harold Ober, Fitzgerald
interrupted work on his novels to write moneymaking popular fiction for the rest of
his life. The Saturday Evening Post became Fitzgerald’s best story market, and he
was regarded as a “Post writer.” His early commercial stories about young love introduced
a fresh character: the independent, determined young American woman who appeared in “The
Offshore Pirate” and “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Fitzgerald’s more ambitious stories,
such as “May Day” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” were published in The Smart
Set, which had a small circulation.

The publication of This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920, made the twenty-four-year-old
Fitzgerald famous almost overnight, and a week later he married Zelda Sayre in New
York. They embarked on an extravagant life as young celebrities. Fitzgerald endeavored
to earn a solid literary reputation, but his playboy image impeded the proper assessment
of his work.

After a riotous summer in Westport, Connecticut, the Fitzgeralds took an apartment
in New York City; there he wrote his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, a naturalistic
chronicle of the dissipation of Anthony and Gloria Patch. When Zelda Fitzgerald became
pregnant they took their first trip to Europe in 1921 and then settled in St. Paul
for the birth of their only child, Frances Scott (Scottie) Fitzgerald, who was born
in October 1921.

The Fitzgeralds expected to become affluent from his play, The Vegetable. In the
fall of 1922 they moved to Great Neck, Long Island, in order to be near Broadway.
The political satireòsubtitled “From President to Postman”òfailed at its tryout in
November 1923, and Fitzgerald wrote his way out of debt with short stories. The distractions
of Great Neck and New York prevented Fitzgerald from making progress on his third
novel. During this time his drinking increased. He was an alcoholic, but he wrote
sober. Zelda Fitzgerald regularly got “tight,” but she was not an alcoholic. There
were frequent domestic rows, usually triggered by drinking bouts.

Literary opinion makers were reluctant to accord Fitzgerald full marks as a serious
craftsman. His reputation as a drinker inspired the myth that he was an irresponsible
writer; yet he was a painstaking reviser whose fiction went through layers of drafts.
Fitzgerald’s clear, lyrical, colorful, witty style evoked the emotions associated
with time and place. When critics objected to Fitzgerald’s concern with love and success,
his response was: “But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.” The
chief theme of Fitzgerald’s work is aspirationòthe idealism he regarded as defining
American character. Another major theme was mutability or loss. As a social historian
Fitzgerald became identified with the Jazz Age: “It was an age of miracles, it was
an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” he wrote in
“Echoes of the Jazz Age.”

Seeking tranquility for his work the Fitzgeralds went to France in the spring of 1924
. He wrote The Great Gatsbyduring the summer and fall in Valescure near St. Raphael,
but the marriage was damaged by Zelda’s involvement with a French naval aviator. The
extent of the affairòif it was in fact consummatedòis not known. On the Riviera the
Fitzgeralds formed a close friendship with affluent and cultured American expatriates
Gerald and Sara Murphy.

The Fitzgeralds spent the winter of 1924-1925 in Rome, where he revised The Great
Gatsby; they were en route to Paris when the novel was published in April. The Great
Gatsby marked a striking advance in Fitzgerald’s technique, utilizing a complex structure
and a controlled narrative point of view. Fitzgerald’s achievement received critical
praise, but sales of Gatsby were disappointing, though the stage and movie rights
brought additional income.

In Paris Fitzgerald met Ernest Hemingwayòthen unknown outside the expatriate literary
circleòwith whom he formed a friendship based largely on his admiration for Hemingway’s
personality and genius. The Fitzgeralds remained in France until the end of 1926,
alternating between Paris and the Riviera. Fitzgerald made little progress on his
fourth novel, a study of American expatriates in France provisionally titled “The
Boy Who Killed His Mother,”“Our Type,” and “The World’s Fair.” During these years
Zelda Fitzgerald’s unconventional behavior became increasingly eccentric.

The Fitzgeralds returned to America to escape the distractions of France. After a
short, unsuccessful stint of screen writing in Hollywood, Fitzgerald rented “Ellerslie,” a
mansion near Wilmington, Delaware, in the spring of 1927. The family remained at “Ellerslie” for
two years interrupted by a visit to Paris in the summer of 1928, but Fitzgerald was
still unable to make significant progress on his novel. At this time Zelda Fitzgerald
commenced ballet training, intending to become a professional dancer. The Fitzgeralds
returned to France in the spring of 1929, where Zelda’s intense ballet work damaged
her health and contributed to the couple’s estrangement. In April 1930 she suffered
her first breakdown. She was treated at Prangins clinic in Switzerland until September
1931, while Fitzgerald lived in Swiss hotels. Work on the novel was again suspended
as he wrote short stories to pay for psychiatric treatment.

Fitzgerald’s peak story fee of $4,000 from The Saturday Evening Post may have had
in 1929 the purchasing power of $40,000 in present-day dollars. Nonetheless, the general
view of his affluence is distorted. Fitzgerald was not among the highest-paid writers
of his time; his novels earned comparatively little, and most of his income came from
160 magazine stories. During the 1920s his income from all sources averaged under
$25,000 a yearògood money at a time when a schoolteacher’s average annual salary was
$1,299, but not a fortune. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald did spend money faster than
he earned it; the author who wrote so eloquently about the effects of money on character
was unable to manage his own finances.

The Fitzgeralds returned to America in the fall of 1931 and rented a house in Montgomery.
Fitzgerald made a second unsuccessful trip to Hollywood in 1931. Zelda Fitzgerald
suffered a relapse in February 1932 and entered Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
She spent the rest of her life as a resident or outpatient of sanitariums.

In 1932, while a patient at Johns Hopkins, Zelda Fitzgerald rapidly wrote Save Me
the Waltz. Her autobiographical novel generated considerable bitterness between the
Fitzgeralds, for he regarded it as pre-empting the material that he was using in his
novel-in-progress. Fitzgerald rented “La Paix,” a house outside Baltimore, where he
completed his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night. Published in 1934, his most ambitious
novel was a commercial failure, and its merits were matters of critical dispute. Set
in France during the 1920s, Tender Is the Night examines the deterioration of Dick
Diver, a brilliant American psychiatrist, during the course of his marriage to a wealthy
mental patient.

The 1936-1937 period is known as “the crack-up” from the title of an essay Fitzgerald
wrote in 1936. Ill, drunk, in debt, and unable to write commercial stories, he lived
in hotels in the region near Asheville, North Carolina, where in 1936 Zelda Fitzgerald
entered Highland Hospital. After Baltimore Fitzgerald did not maintain a home for
Scottie. When she was fourteen she went to boarding school, and the Obers became her
surrogate family. Nonetheless, Fitzgerald functioned as a concerned father by mail,
attempting to supervise Scottie’s education and to shape her social values.

Fitzgerald went to Hollywood alone in the summer of 1937 with a six-month Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
screenwriting contract at $1,000 a week. He received his only screen credit for adapting Three
Comrades (1938), and his contract was renewed for a year at $1,250 a week. The $91,000
he earned from MGM was a great deal of money during the late Depression years when
a new Chevrolet coupe cost $619; but although Fitzgerald paid off most of his debts,
he was unable to save. His trips East to visit his wife were disastrous. In California
Fitzgerald fell in love with movie columnist Sheilah Graham. Their relationship endured
despite his benders. After MGM dropped his option at the end of 1938, Fitzgerald worked
as a freelance script writer and wrote short-short stories for Esquire. He began his
Hollywood novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, in 1939 and had written more than half
of a working draft when he died of a heart attack in Graham’s apartment on December
21, 1940. Zelda Fitzgerald perished at a fire in Highland Hospital in 1948.

F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. The obituaries were condescending,
and he seemed destined for literary obscurity. The first phase of the Fitzgerald resurrectionò“revival” does
not properly describe the processòoccurred between 1945 and 1950. By 1960 he had achieved
a secure place among America’s enduring writers. The Great Gatsby, a work that seriously
examines the theme of aspiration in an American setting, defines the classic American
novel.